Saturday, January 29, 2005

PTA to suspend cell phone companies' licenses

From Dawn:

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority may suspend the licences of two major cell phone companies if the reports of its secret survey, which is starting on Feb 1, establishes poor quality of their service.

They said the survey would be completed by Feb 15 and action would be initiated on its recommendations. The survey was being launched on customers' complaints. The PTA had already served notices on the two companies for their poor quality of service, congestion, wrong messaging, frequent call drops and fake billing.

They said the companies had already been given enough time to remove these problems, therefore, no leniency would be shown if the survey found them persisting with shortcomings. The PTA might also impose heavy fines on them, they added.

The sources said the firms were trying to capture more market at any cost before the launch of service by two new companies this year. "In a bid to capture more clientele, these companies have been compromising on service for long," they said. "The PTA is very sensitive to its obligations and will do every thing possible to protect interest of its customers."


P.S: If its supposed to be a 'secret survey', why are they discussing it with the press? Mobilink for one has already been fined in the past, but instead of being repentant, it has proceeded to provide the worst service in its history. If they had spent the crores on improving their service, instead of on their 'Indigo' advertising campaign, they could have boasted of at least some satified customers. I wonder if a satisfied Mobilink customer actually exists..

2 comments:

Teeth Maestro said...

Slap on the cuffs - I was a 0300 user but wised up an switched over to 0333 - Mobilink has minted money for so many years and now lounge in the wealth with absoultely no quality service at all. Down with Mobilink, I ask you all, would they indeed suspend the company or is it just black-balling?

yasirmemon said...

I dont think they can suspend such a huge user-base in a matter of so called 15 days declared secret monitoring (whatever that is)...

If I ask you to leave your number for good, just because mobilink go busted by our govt. how would you react?

They should rather keep fining them to make them improve their service. Closing them would only complicate the situation more! Where will those 10 million users go that kicked out for nothing? To go and kick another one out? They have to stay, PTA had got to keep something like the better the service, the less the licence fee or something type strategy...